[plug] ComputerBank meeting Tues 24th 7:45pm

[Christian]

bob at contact.omen.com.au wrote:
> Ok, please keep in mind that the whole point of the exercise is to give
> people who may not have _any_ skills with computers a way in. To that end
> KISS is needed sometimes otherwise you'll just scare people away and
> that's not going to be helpful :). Debians unfriendly install could be a
> strike against it at this point in time for these people, perhaps once we
> have people up to "advanced" we can introduce hard options, but to be
> really usefull CB have to teach what's under the hood not just end user
> progs (while maintaining the KISS principle) so compromises have to be
> made.  If debian has any advantages for teaching CB would like to hear
> them and we're alway ready to be persuaded that "it's not that bad,
> really" but at the moment the consensus is that Slackware and RedHat fill
> the organisations needs. (We did discuss creating our own distro but
> thought that it may be a bit ambitious at the moment :).

Gary's point was that Debian *may* have a hard install but since the
install is going to be done _for_ the end-user, this hardly matters. 
Once the machine is setup and configured, the majority of the work being
done by the user will be installation of new software - which Debian's
APT makes about as easy as it ever could be - easier than the other
distributions I believe.

Installing Slackware would be just plain STUPID.  If you want to KISS
then I wish you good luck in explaining to these complete newbies "First
you untar the .tar.gz or .tgz file.  Then you read the installation
instructions.  They might be in README or INSTALL or something else
completely different.  Then you need to check to see if you have the
requirements mentioned in these files - plus any other implicit
requirements that aren't mentioned and should be obvious.  If you don't
have the requirements then......."

Personally, I'd rather be telling them "You type 'apt-get install
program'."

Regards,

Christian.

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